wry smile
This passage from Doris Lessing comes from Karen over at One House:
Of course my friend knows, just as my parents hopefully believed, when I presented them with exactly the same you-are-damned, I-and-my-friends-are-saved pattern, that her daughter will “grow out of it.” The Western world is full of people who’ve been through this experience of being, when young, a member of a group of raving bigots and lunatics, and have emerged from it. I would say that half the people I know in Britain come into this category. But in our case it was political, not religious. Remembering our time of total commitment to a set of dogmas that we now find pathetic, we tend to wear wry smiles.
Meanwhile, we observe later generations going through it and, knowing what we are capable of, fear for them. Perhaps it is not too much to say that in these violent times the kindest, wisest wish we have for the young must be: “We hope that your period of immersion in group lunacy, group self-righteousness, will not coincide with some period of your country’s history when you can put your murderous and stupid ideas into practice.
If you are lucky, you will emerge much enlarged by your experience of what you are capable of in the way of bigotry and intolerance. You will understand absolutely how sane people, in periods of public insanity, can murder, destroy, lie, swear black is white."
Lessing, Doris. Prisons We Choose To Live Inside. Montreal: CBC Enterprises; 1986, p. 34.
Of course my friend knows, just as my parents hopefully believed, when I presented them with exactly the same you-are-damned, I-and-my-friends-are-saved pattern, that her daughter will “grow out of it.” The Western world is full of people who’ve been through this experience of being, when young, a member of a group of raving bigots and lunatics, and have emerged from it. I would say that half the people I know in Britain come into this category. But in our case it was political, not religious. Remembering our time of total commitment to a set of dogmas that we now find pathetic, we tend to wear wry smiles.
Meanwhile, we observe later generations going through it and, knowing what we are capable of, fear for them. Perhaps it is not too much to say that in these violent times the kindest, wisest wish we have for the young must be: “We hope that your period of immersion in group lunacy, group self-righteousness, will not coincide with some period of your country’s history when you can put your murderous and stupid ideas into practice.
If you are lucky, you will emerge much enlarged by your experience of what you are capable of in the way of bigotry and intolerance. You will understand absolutely how sane people, in periods of public insanity, can murder, destroy, lie, swear black is white."
Lessing, Doris. Prisons We Choose To Live Inside. Montreal: CBC Enterprises; 1986, p. 34.
posted by Lisa at 10:03 p.m.
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